painted black upon the whitest lies
by Nirav
Summary: by the time she's twelve, she's decided she's not going to have panic attacks anymore.


_i'm faking glory_

_lick my lips toss my hair_

_and send a smile over_

_and the stories brand new_

_but i can take it from here_

_i'll find my own bravado_

_it's a switch flipped_

_it's a pill tipped back, it's a moon eclipsed_

_and i can tell you that when the lights come on i'll be ready for this_

* * *

The oldest memory Beth has is of falling out of a tree.

She's four and it's summer and the neighbor's backyard is full of people, but none of them are looking at her. She's escaped the pack of children that straggled in with their parents for the cookout, slipped away as they divide into teams for Red Rover and left the anxiety coiled in her stomach with them.

There's a tree in the corner of the yard and it towers over her, but there's a ladder hammered into the trunk that leads up up up to the rickety platform of an unfinished treehouse. A bird flutters over to the platform, and then away, and then back, away and back, again and again and again, until Beth's fingers grip at the ladder and her sneakers find purchase on the first rung. There must be something worth the bird's interest, and she makes it up one step, then another, and another.

It's fine until there's someone calling her name from down below. Marie is staring up at her and chattering excitedly, firing questions and naive good cheer and Beth's name, over and over and over, until Beth's cheeks go hot and her hands cramp up on the rung above her.

She hits the ground on her side, landing hard at Marie's feet, and before she can even inhale to cry at the pain in her arm there are six adults crowding around her, her parents shoving through the circle to her side.

She ends up in the hospital, not for the bruise on her arm but for the way her lungs closed up, breath shuddering to a halt under the panicky weight of everyone staring at her.

* * *

In grade school, it takes less than a year before she's sent to a special room once a day to talk to Mr. Miller. He looks like Santa Claus and offers her a Jolly Rancher every time she walks in, and tries to get her to speak in more than monosyllabic mumbles. You're so smart, he says, and we just don't understand why you don't want to talk to your classmates.

Her mother calls it shyness and insists that she'll grow out of it in her own time. Her father kisses the top of her head and ruffles her hair and tells her that she's just perfect the way she is, cradling her in his lap easily. Her teachers write long notes home because _Beth is a wonderful student, but I'm concerned about how unwilling she is to interact with others_.

She forgets how to breathe for the second time when she's nine. It's her birthday and the class is having a party, like they do for everyone's birthday, and people crowd in with her at the table where cake is served. She's rattled around in the enthusiasm and the _people_ and her hands clench the paper plate so hard against the tremble in her fingers that it rips in her hands. Cake tumbles to the table in front of her and she reaches for it, fingers violently scraping it onto the plate to hide the evidence and shake the stares away.

It's not until the teacher sends everyone else back to their desks and kindly walks Beth to Mr. Miller's office that her breath comes back. Her hands are still covered in frosting, sticky and warm, and her fingers tremble as she washes them in the sink in Mr. Miller's office.

Outside his window, one of the other classes is outside for recess. Kids run in packs, yelling and jostling and shouting, easy and carefree. Behind her, Mr. Miller is on the phone with her mother, but she stays at the sink, staring out the window.

Her mother takes her to a doctor. They call it a panic attack and her mother cries and hugs her tightly, her arms warm and familiar and not at all terrifying.

The doctor gives them pages and pages of printouts and a handful of business cards when they leave. By the next week, she has a standing appointment with a therapist after school every Wednesday and a doctor's note to give to her teachers that's filled with words like panic disorder and anxiety, words she doesn't understand yet, words that draw sad sympathy and careful conversation from teachers and her parents.

* * *

By the time she's twelve, she's decided she's not going to have panic attacks anymore.

She joins a cross country running club and squares her shoulders against the weighty fear of surrounding herself by thirty strangers four days a week. She tells the coach that she has asthma, just in case a panic attack ambushes her, and swears she won't push too hard.

Running is easy. After running to empty corners and quiet rooms her whole life, the easy consistency of jogging is nothing. The black spots that dot her vision in the middle of a panic attack, the ones that burst out of her inability to breathe, can't keep up with her when she's running. If she keeps moving, she stays in the light, and her jittery limbs are ready for the lights to stay on.

* * *

At fourteen, she tells her therapist that she's beaten the panic disorder and is going to join the debate team and won't be coming in anymore. Her therapist protests, babbling warnings about taking things slow, but Beth walks out of the room and sits in the hallway outside the office until her father comes to pick her up.

She practices easy smiles and simple breaths in the mirror, every morning and every night, until she can walk through crowded hallways and keep her pulse level. The smiles are fake but the control is real, and she slides easily from class to cross country to debate team, a study of composure.

The debate teams goes to the regional finals, and she demolishes her opponent when her turn comes. Applause rings through the room, ricocheting off of hard surfaces and bouncing into her chest, and she smiles broadly.

By the end of her first year of high school, she scoffs loudly when her parents mention the panic attacks that once pinned her to back walls and empty rooms. Who could ever want to be alone when people have so much more to offer?

* * *

It's not until she's in the police academy that her bravado slips. High school was easy, college was easy, but the academy is loud and terrifying and exhausting and she wants it, more than anything, but her body betrays her the first time the cadets are crowded into an undersized room with no ventilation.

The trainers are yelling and shoving, stutter-stop flashing the flights at them, and she can handle the hazing until she can't and the muscles in her chest clamp down around her lungs and she can't breathe. Her vision blurs and her knees buckle and she sways, once and twice and then she's down on her knees, hands clamped over her ears and eyes screwed shut.

By the time she can breathe again, she's slumped against a wall and the room is empty except for one of the academy psychologists and a trainer, checking her pulse and handing her a bottle of water. She swears to her trainer that it won't happen again and allows the psychologist to set her up for epilepsy testing- _just in case_, he says kindly, the exercise having exposed more than one cadet's epileptic sensitivities in the past- so that she can get back to work.

By the time she's convinced them that she'll be fine and the lights are turned back on, she's flipped the switch back to its rightful place and turned the composure back on.

One slip up is not failure. She pushes harder than the rest of her classmates and finishes at the top of her class. The graduation ceremony comes and goes with applause and congratulations, and she smiles wide into the crowd. The lights are on, and she's ready to be a police officer.

* * *

A year after finishing at the academy, she's at a local shooting range knocking off rounds with her partner, betting drinks against bullseyes, but his eyes are caught by the woman two lanes away. He wanders off in search of less professional pastures, leaving her to shoot alone.

It's crowded, half of the range blocked off for a class, and the range master starts doubling shooters into the lanes. She's paired off with a tall man, all glass-cut jawline and military neatness; he offers an apologetic smile and waves for her to go first, silent inside his earplugs. When she reels in a target that would be good enough to get her shitfaced on her partner's dime if he wasn't so busy flirting, her new friend offers her a thumbs-up and an impressed smile.

They trade turns for half an hour, until she runs out of bullets, and he dismantles his gun quickly and follows her away from the range, yanking his earplugs out to speak for the first time.

His name is Paul, and he asks her to dinner. They wind up at his place instead and it's not her- not her at _all_- but she wakes up in his bed and he's made breakfast and coffee, so she swallows the wave of panic edging into her chest and joins him for breakfast.

Six months later, she introduces him to her parents. Six months after that, they're living together, and they still go to the shooting range once a month, betting drinks against bullseyes.

* * *

Years pass, one by one, and they stop going to the shooting range- he's on assignment in the Middle East for two months at a time, she's on a sting or stakeout the weekends he's home; he's always leaving, and she's always letting him- and then they stop eating dinner together when they're both home because he doesn't love her and she can't make him. They pay respect to their relationship in obligatory anniversary dinners and training for marathons together, but they don't talk, they don't touch, until Beth's parents die, three weeks and two days apart from one another. Paul catches her before she topples over when she gets the first news- her mother- and then again for her father; he carries her to bed and stays with her for the four days it takes to find anything worth standing up for.

By the time the funerals are over with, they're back to their baseline of avoidance, and the department shrink puts Beth on mood stabilizers for the first time.

* * *

It's barely a month after making detective that the glue she's applied to her life starts melting away.

First it's Paul, distant and fake but always kind in his disinterest with the life they share and the way she loves him. Then it's the five year anniversary of her parents' deaths, an annual one-two punch spread out over three weeks and two days that leaves her crawling from a panic attack to a bottle.

Then Katja Obinger bursts into the picture, all rockstar-red hair and hacking cough and emails of birth certificates and death certificates and grisly crime scene photos that burn bright like a reflection. French Beth, double tap to the chest from a long-range weapon. Italian Beth, stabbed four times in close quarters. Austrian Beth, hit by a car. Katja drags her in and Beth's panic hitches along, rooting into her malfunctioning chest and shaking hands.

The department shrink suggests a vacation, looking over the tops of her glasses at the circles under Beth's eyes and the frown her mouth defaults to, and Beth talks her into more medication instead. Between the anti-psychotics and the scotch, she can almost breathe through an entire day again, even as her life fractures into disjointed fragments blurred by a medicated haze of facial recognition software and the search for every other version of Beth that apparently exists in the world.

Paul pays lip service to his worry, but she tosses his concerns away with emptied prescription bottles and shots of whiskey. With clones and serial killers and conspiracies chasing her back into the darkest corners of panic and insecurity, she hasn't the time to care for his flat words or rote, scheduled overtures of sex or romance.

Months pass with no progress- on Paul, on clones, on surviving- and she measures her time in moments between drinks and pill bottles and clandestine conversations on secret cell phones..

* * *

They're _clones_. Freaks, as Allison's fear puts it. Genetic identicals, as Cosima's fascination puts it. Clones.

She manages to make it through the first conversation with Allison and Cosima and then out to her car before the panic bursts out of her chest, taking all of the air with it and leaving her collapsed against the steering wheel, struggling to suck in a breath before spots start to swim in her vision. After an hour she's calm enough to drive, but her hands still throttle the steering wheel, all white knuckles and creaking leather and over-correcting turns.

After that she glides from case to case with Art and ignores the bored silences at home, instead burying her focus instead in Allison and Cosima and Katja and finding out where they came from. She visits her parents' graves once, fingers digging half-grown grass out of the dirt in chunks because they aren't there to remind her that she's still their daughter.

Even running isn't enough to keep her hands from shaking or her lungs from closing in on themselves anymore. Three miles a day turns into five, to seven, to twelve, and there are still black spots on the periphery, chasing her strides.

* * *

Five months after the first time she chased a handful of antipsychotics with half a bottle of scotch, Beth follows a weak lead- an Interpol footnote on a retired scientist leads to a series of phone records and a name and a symbol- and she finds Maggie Chen's religious zealotry and fury in an alleyway. Her service weapon is shaking in her hand before she can stop it and then there's another one- another her- bursting with wild blonde hair and the sallow exhaustion that Beth covers with make-up every morning, floating through the alley on childlike steps and holding a knife out easily in front of her as Maggie Chen points her towards Beth, venomous and accusatory and-

Then Maggie Chen is dead, three of Beth's bullets in her chest, and the other clone is sprinting away, and the sharp scent of gunpowder is spreading through the alley. The gun falls from her hands and she gasps loudly for breath as dark spots crowd her vision, stumbling down to the ground and digging her fingers into cracks in the asphalt, searching for pain to pull her out of the panic.

* * *

The day before her hearing, the union representative assigned to her case calls her in for a meeting and lists out every possible result, from fully cleared to criminal charges for manslaughter. Paul is out of town so Beth goes to a bar instead of home and stares into a glass of scotch for hours, the liquid swishing in time with the shaking of her fingers.

Too tired to drive, she walks to the train station and slumps against a column, eyes unfocused and drifting as she waits for the train.

A woman slouches off the train that's just come in, all ripped t-shirts and dyed hair and thigh-highs and Beth's face, making a beeline for a payphone. Another clone, another Beth, another victim or another murderer.

There's no panic, just exhaustion and a few quiet tears, as she places her bag on the platform, folds her coat, lines up her shoes neatly. The automated announcement of the arriving train whistles emptily past her ears.

She almost hesitates when the other woman sees her, eyes identical to hers widening, brow creasing, mouth thinning into a tight line. The train's horn blares, headlight flooding the platform, and Beth turns away.

It's three easy strides and a lazy jump into the burning light of the train's path. The lights are on, and she's ready for them to turn off.


End file.
